Sisters in Spirit Reading List
October 4th is recognized as Sisters in Spirit to remember missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit folks while also fighting to end colonialist violence. In Dawson we are gathering on Monday, October 5th.
We asked folks around Dawson what books they suggest folks read to better understand colonialism, the violence that Indigenous peoples experience, and building a different world that centres Indigenous knowledge.
Hammerstones: A History of the Tr'ondek Hwech'in
by Helene Dobrowolsky
This is the story of the Tr'ondek Hwech'in, the First Nations people who lived at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers. The 1896 Klondike gold discoveries brought massive changes to the Yukon and displaced the Tr'ondek Hwech'in from their traditional home at Tr'ochek. Mining destroyed hunting grounds, new laws limited access to the land and the newcomers almost overwhelmed their culture. A century later, the battle to save Tr'ochek was part of a larger struggle by the Tr'ondek Hwech'in to regain control of their lives and become a self-governing First Nation.
From Yukon Books
Suggested by Georgette, Hän Language Administrator with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government
Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls
by Jessica McDiarmid
For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been found murdered along an isolated stretch of highway in northwestern British Columbia. The highway is known as the Highway of Tears, and it has come to symbolize a national crisis.
Journalist Jessica McDiarmid investigates the devastating effect these tragedies have had on the families of the victims and their communities, and how systemic racism and indifference have created a climate where Indigenous women and girls are over-policed, yet under-protected. Through interviews with those closest to the victims—mothers and fathers, siblings and friends—McDiarmid offers an intimate, first-hand account of their loss and relentless fight for justice. Examining the historically fraught social and cultural tensions between settlers and Indigenous peoples in the region, McDiarmid links these cases to others across Canada—now estimated to number up to 4,000—contextualizing them within a broader examination of the undervaluing of Indigenous lives in this country.
Highway of Tears is a powerful story about our ongoing failure to provide justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and a testament to their families and communities' unwavering determination to find it.
From Penguin Random House
Suggested by Erin, Social Assistance Administrator with Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Government
Together Today for our Children Tomorrow
by the Yukon Indian People
In 1973, Elijah Smith and a delegation of Yukon Chiefs, including Dan Johnson of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, went to Ottawa to meet with the Prime Minister of Canada. Armed only with their determination, courage and the historic document, Together Today For Our Children Tomorrow, they were able to convince the federal government to begin a negotiation process for a modern-day treaty, the first in Canada.
Read Together Today For Our Children Tomorrow here.
Suggested by Caroline, DWS staff
Braiding Sweetgrass: INDIGENOUS WISDOM, SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF PLANTS
By Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
From Milkweed Editions
Suggested by Kim, DWS staff
Available in the DWS Lending Library!
The Inconvenient Indian:A Curious Account of Native People in North America
by Thomas King
Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, The Inconvenient Indian distills the insights gleaned from Thomas King's critical and personal meditation on what it means to be "Indian" in North America, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope--a sometimes inconvenient but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.
From Penguin Random House
Suggested by Aneke, DWS staff
A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder
by Ma-Nee Chacaby and Mary Louisa Plummer
A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.
As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and in her teen years became alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counsellor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in Thunder Bay.
Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humour, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.
From University of Manitoba Press
Available in the DWS Lending Library!
Tr'ëhuhch'in näwtr'udäh'ą: finding our way home
by Chris Clarke, Sharon Moore, aND K'änächá Group
The scrapbook tells a story of the First Nation children from Dawson City, Yukon, who went to Indian Residential School (IRS). The story is told by K'änächá, a group of former IRS students from the Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in Nation. Our aim in telling this story is to try to educate people on what happened to us at residential school because we, and other First Nations across the country, are still hurting, and many do not understand why.
From Tr'ëhuhch'in näwtr'udäh'ą introduction.
Drop-in to DWS and read the scrapbook!
Suggested by Crickett, DWS staff
Islands of Decolonial Love
By Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
In her debut collection of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love, renowned writer and activist Leanne Simpson vividly explores the lives of contemporary Indigenous Peoples and communities, especially those of her own Nishnaabeg nation. Found on reserves, in cities and small towns, in bars and curling rinks, canoes and community centres, doctors offices and pickup trucks, Simpson's characters confront the often heartbreaking challenge of pairing the desire to live loving and observant lives with a constant struggle to simply survive the historical and ongoing injustices of racism and colonialism. Told with voices that are rarely recorded but need to be heard, and incorporating the language and history of her people, Leanne Simpson's Islands of Decolonial Love is a profound, important, and beautiful book of fiction.
From ARP Books
Available in the DWS Lending Library!
THIS PLACE: 150 Years Retold
by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Sonny Assu, Brandon Mitchell, Rachel and Sean Qitsualik-Tinsley, David A. Robertson, Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair, Jen Storm, Richard Van Camp, Katherena Vermette, Chelsea Vowel | illustrated by Tara Audibert, Kyle Charles, GMB Chomichuk, Natasha Donovan, Scott B. Henderson, Ryan Howe, Andrew Lodwick, Jen Storm | colour by Scott A. Ford, Donovan Yaciuk
Explore the past 150 years through the eyes of Indigenous creators in this groundbreaking graphic novel anthology. Beautifully illustrated, these stories are an emotional and enlightening journey through Indigenous wonderworks, psychic battles, and time travel. See how Indigenous peoples have survived a post-apocalyptic world since Contact.
Available in the DWS Lending Library!
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
by Alicia Elliott
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political—from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Native communities.
With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott provides a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future.
From Penguin Random House
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